Those Who Walk in Darkness

Rating:
Summary: If you love'd the internet short...
Review: I loved the short on U/E so when I saw the DVD at Best Buy, I figured it was just that, the collection of all those 3 minute episodes wound together into one movie. It turned out that's exactly what it was and I still love it! It's a great story about a grunt in the war between "normals" (what the hell does that mean?) and "freaks". I know some people wont get this comparison but "X-Men" is "Saving Private Ryan" while this movie is "All Quiet On The Western Front".

Rating:
Summary: Good concept, poor execution
Review: The back of the DVD clearly states "Running Time: 90 Minutes". The movie is actually 56 minutes long, and a good 6 of that (or so) is repeated animation with a different voice over. I have quite a few DVDs and this is the only one I've noticed that combines the movie and special features to artificially inflate the listed time. I could not find any reviews of this movie online, but since it is a variation of X-men and appeared to be a full length movie, I decided to gamble...

This character/concept was originally produced as an online series. The animation looks like it was still done in Flash (complete with transition effects for a character to turn their head from side to side, and various jerky animations throughout). That is not necessarily a bad thing, just a different style. Blood, however (not that there is much in the movie), was very poorly done.

In what I watched of the interviews, they were claiming that the extra time they were able to put into the movie (apparently not enough for a feature length film, though) allowed them to do much more character development than the web series. What character development??? I would be hard pressed to use more than one sentence to describe any of the 4 or 5 distinct characters in the movie, and could easily do so in about three words.

There was some bad voice acting during the first part of the movie (minor characters) and some really lame, cliché lines. Speaking of dialog problems, at one point a character refers to a mutant as being telekinetic; in fact, he was telepathic (there were no telekinetic mutants in the movie). The voice acting for the main characters is ok, and the dialog started to get better. I even began to think the movie might become good, but it ended before that could happen.

This 'movie' seemed more the pilot episode of a series. Major characters are given a brief introduction, the situation is setup, there is negligible character development and much of the story is unresolved (to try to get you to tune in next week). Speaking of story, there were a couple completely illogical and inconsistent story elements that were fundamental to the plot line. If they had fixed these and taken another half hour to actually complete the story, it could have been an ok movie (and still set it up as an ongoing series).